Dickson Yeo in a photo from his personal Facebook page. Yeo, who also goes by the name Dickson Yeo, was recruited as an intelligence asset after being invited to give a presentation to Chinese academics in Beijing in 2015. His doctorate research focused on China’s treatment of small states along the trajectory of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) maritime routes and land infrastructure networks. Singapore’s leaders have, however, regularly cautioned that a deterioration of US-China ties could upend multilateralism by forcing Southeast Asian countries to choose sides. With China as its largest trading partner, and the US as its largest single country investor, the city-state sees its interests best served through neutrality. It’s more a symptom of these challenges.” “The incident itself serves to highlight the difficulty of trying to thread the needle between Beijing and Washington, given the widespread influence from both major powers across Singapore society,” said Ja Ian Chong, a Harvard-Yenching Institute visiting scholar. “The incident itself does not change that. Though analysts believe the spying case isn’t likely to have a major impact on Singapore’s ties with either the US or China, most agree that the island-state’s efforts to maintain a delicate diplomatic balance between the two major powers will be more difficult as US-China relations deteriorate sharply ahead of the US presidential election in November. Yeo, a former PhD student at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP), an autonomous postgraduate school of the National University of Singapore (NUS) which trains some of Asia’s top civil servants and government officials, now faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison after confessing to acting as an illegal agent for Chinese intelligence. Tasked with obtaining non-public information about politics, economics, and diplomacy, 39-year-old Singaporean academic and doctoral degree candidate Jun Wei Yeo admitted to establishing a fake consultancy and using social networking site LinkedIn to cultivate ties with US military and government employees holding high-level security clearances. ![]() ![]() SINGAPORE – An espionage case involving a Singaporean national who recently pled guilty to spying for Chinese intelligence services in a US federal court has stoked concerns that citizens of the ethnic Chinese majority city-state be regarded with greater suspicion by the United States amid a new Cold War atmosphere.
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